PositionApp Helps Developers Track App Store Performance On The Go

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Today, UK design firm ustwo has launched PositionApp, an iPhone application that provides data regarding the top 300 apps in the App Store from the last 6 months. The price of the app would have been $7, but AdMob (well, Google technically) is sponsoring the app so that it is free for the next two months.

Coupled with its launch, ustwo also provided MobileCrunch with some exclusive graphs showing which app categories have been most popular over the last 6 months. Unlike most App Store data, this data comes directly from scraping iTunes, which means that it is a 100% accurate assessment of the App Store. Anyone interested in the App Store should hit the jump and check out what PositionApp has found.

PositionApp is a simple application: ustwo crawls the App Store on an hourly basis and collects data from the top 300 apps across all categories and geographies. They’ve been doing this for 6 months and have now launched an application which enables you to see, in graphs and numbers, what apps have been successful for the last 6 months and what rankings they’ve held. The user interface is slick, but I found that I actually wanted even more data than this app had.

The app is kept up-to-date in real-time so PositionApp will provide you with the ability to check how your app is doing (should it be in the top 300) compared to others. Of course, it is a niche application and likely won’t ever be in the top 300 itself (ironic, isn’t it?), but developers will find it as a good on-the-go resource to tracking App Store successes and failures — or more accurately, successes and near successes.

PositionApp comes with more in-depth features such as country-by-country tracking so you can see how your favorite apps do in different markets. It also lets you see who the biggest movers are, which is a good way to get ahead on

The data that ustwo has been scraping also provides additional insights into the App Store. They put together some graphs to show MobileCrunch readers what app categories are the most popular, both free and paid. The graphs (shown below) show clearly that the App Store is dominated by games (over 50% in paid and 40% in free). Next up is Entertainment applications, followed by Utilities.

After that, it gets dicey. On the free side, Lifestyle and Music applications are clearly doing well (each with about 5% of the top 300). However, there is no clear winning category on the paid side after games, Entertainment and Utilities.

Perhaps equally as interesting are the categories doing the worst. Sports, Navigation, News and Travel are all doing fairly poorly among other paid categories. In free, Weather and Finance can be added to that list as well.

It’s important to remember that many apps go into the top 300 simply because of low price points (Games) and that high-priced applications don’t tend to get enough sales to make it to the top 300 (Navigation). That said, the numbers are surely interesting.